Stop Close Reading

For a while now, middle school and high school English classes
throughout the nation have been teaching something called "close
reading"--with varying degrees of success. "Close reading" is about
taking a chapter, a page, a paragraph, or even a single sentence, and
picking it apart to extract meaning or see what the author is doing.
It's a vehicle for teaching students about cadence and imagery,
hopefully leading youthful minds to appreciate the complexity of
authors' thoughts.

We should end it. Students almost
universally hate close reading, and they rarely wind up understanding
it anyway. Forced to pick out meaning in passages they don't fully
grasp to begin with, they begin to get the idea that English class is
about simply making things up (Ah yes--the tree mentioned once on page
89 and then never again stands for weakness and loss!) and constructing
increasingly circuitous arguments by way of support. (It's because it's
an elm, and when you think elm, you think Dutch elm disease, and elms
are dying out--sort of like their relationship, see?)

So what
would happen if we ditched this sacred teaching technique? For
starters, we could help students read more. Close reading has been
behind the trend
of reading fewer books, but reading them more slowly. What the
attentive reading proponents ignore is that many students are in danger
of failing to see the literary forest for the trees. Speeding
things up might make it easier to grasp--and appreciate--the overall arc
of a book, while allowing the opportunity for real connection with the
characters and plot. You can't do that at the pace of a chapter a
week.

Furthermore, aiming for fifteen books a year, rather
than five, might expose the students to more good literature (immersion
in quality prose being one of the best ways of learning writing)
and increase their chances of finding a book they like. There would still
be plenty of opportunity to point out metaphors and similes. We'd also
have more time for grammar, rhetoric, and composition--the building
blocks of the language we're supposed to be teaching. If the goal of an
English class is to improve students' grasp of language, introduce them
to great literature, and--hopefully--get students excited, then there's
really no downside to this approach. With 12th grade reading ability in
depressing straits nationwide, we've certainly little to lose.

If a few students really want to do close reading, they can do it as an
elective or jump in head first in college. Otherwise, let's chuck the
concept. We gain nothing by teaching kids to hate books--and hate them
s-l-o-w-l-y.

Electricity bills are confusing, and don't arrive until long after the damage is done. The fix to a system that's high in both costs and headaches lies in connecting consumers to their consumption--show people what they're using in real time, and make it easy to compare costs to kilowatts. Geoffrey Gagnon